Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – live socially in colonies while most species (>90%) – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.
Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, but they are small and often mistaken for wasps or flies. Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species, whose workers are less than 2 millimetres (0.08 in) long, to the leafcutter bee Megachile pluto, the largest species of bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres (1.54 in).
Bees feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae. Vertebrate predators of bees include primates and birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.
Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, and the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species across Britain from 1980 to 2013 found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they inhabited in 1980.
Human beekeeping or apiculture (meliponiculture for stingless bees) has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common. In Mesoamerica, the Mayans have practiced large-scale intensive meliponiculture since pre-Columbian times
Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. Eusociality appears to have originated from at least three independent origins in halictid bees. The most advanced of these are species with eusocial colonies; these are characterised by cooperative brood care and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive adults, plus overlapping generations. This division of labour creates specialized groups within eusocial societies which are called castes. In some species, groups of cohabiting females may be sisters, and if there is a division of labour within the group, they are considered semisocial. The group is called eusocial if, in addition, the group consists of a mother (the queen) and her daughters (workers). When the castes are purely behavioural alternatives, with no morphological differentiation other than size, the system is considered primitively eusocial, as in many paper wasps; when the castes are morphologically discrete, the system is considered highly eusocial.
True honey bees (genus Apis, of which eight species are currently recognized) are highly eusocial, and are among the best known insects. Their colonies are established by swarms, consisting of a queen and several thousand workers. Africanized bees are a hybrid strain of A. mellifera that escaped from experiments involving crossing European and African subspecies; they are extremely defensive.
Many bumblebees are eusocial, similar to the eusocial Vespidae such as hornets in that the queen initiates a nest on her own rather than by swarming.
Most other bees, including familiar insects such as carpenter bees, leafcutter bees and mason bees are solitary in the sense that every female is fertile, and typically inhabits a nest she constructs herself. There is no division of labor so these nests lack queens and worker bees for these species. Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax. Bees collect pollen to feed their young, and have the necessary adaptations to do this. Solitary bees are important pollinators; they gather pollen to provision their nests with food for their brood. Often it is mixed with nectar to form a paste-like consistency.
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I’m sure any left-leaning online community gets this a lot so I don’t think this deserves its own post, but what first radicalized y’all?
For me, it’s porky refusing to hold up its end of capitalism. Labor makes porky rich, porky uses those riches to expand his business, give himself a more competitive edge by lowering prices, increasing quality of product, or hiring a larger workforce. Or so it goes in theory.
But starting with the millennials, we’ve seen porky shirk this flow. Now porky doesn’t want to hire, let alone expand his business because he wants a better deal, yet when labor does this when unionizing it’s demonized. Look at all the layoffs in the 2020s, it’s been practically a new golden age for the bourgeoisie but they’re still laying people off en masse and shrinking their businesses like they’re going through horrible losses. This is because all those cuts are in porky’s interests, get as much output for as little input as one can get away with.
So on paper, I like the free market as long as porky plays by “the rules”, but capitalism is too easily gamed by porky so now I would prefer a more democratized economy that cannot be so easily hijacked.
TL;DR: I seriously question if capitalism is even beneficial to the average citizen in the imperial core. I ironically turned red because CAPITAL went LAZY on ME!
Anti-Bush anti-war kid with left-lib working class parents➡️’08 crash ruins family’s livelihood and disillusions me with Obama and liberalism➡️OWS happens, become a demsoc, get into Zinn, Chomsky, Graeber, HST, etc➡️Get into Bernie '16, DNC fucks everyone, HRC shits the bed, pied Piper strat backfires and gets big wet boy elected, lose last bit of hope in reformism and incrementalism in the US, get radicalized➡️Start actually reading theory and history and researching parapolitics and the political economy of finance ties to intelligence services and espionage and their role in imperialism and foreign interventions, become a Marxist-Leninist that’s Mao-curious
basically
Close enough for me as well
Similar here. I think I hung on a bit longer to the Obama illusion a bit longer. Like I was leftist enough to know what he did in response to the '08 crash was shit, but I was still enough of an Obama supporter that I’d just repeat the whole “but the bailouts did at least save the economy” bs.
The thing that finally broke it for me were the leaks of the drone program under Obama.
I was also in college and my Marxism professor, while unfortunately slowed down by his advanced age, was always critical of Obama and neoliberalism. I also took an international relations course that focused on terrorism and my professor was really good. He seemed to be sympathetic to anti-imperialist causes and really made us think about the struggles that liberation movements went though. If I had to guess I would think he was a leftist himself as he had a focus on some more leftist organizations, like the IRA.
Honestly this is also pretty accurate. Seeing all the horrifying shit go down. The government spoiling rotten the very people that ruined my life is enough to make anyone radicalize.
Obama going out of his way to make sure AIG execs got their 7+ figure bonuses after they went bankrupt while the entire construction industry tanked and tons of people lost their jobs after the housing market bubble burst really cemented “okay fuck Obama” to me, the drone murder expansion and Libya/Syria/Haiti stuff was just icing on the cake to me after that
56 military interventions into South America since the end of WW2. My coming to Marx moment had more to do with imperial violence than economic hardship or virulent otherising because of me and the way that I am. It took a little bit of being ragdolled by someone playing around in BJJ that made me realize the escalation of violence for someone to really want to hurt you -> someone who had a weapon -> someone who really wanted to hurt you with a weapon -> someone who had a big gun -> a group of people who had big guns -> someone who’s ready to blow up a building because you’re in it is fucking bananas. It really painted the picture of this war-seeking capitalist machine as a snarling beast while people just want to grill, play League of Legends. There was a stand out thought from the 2016 election that survived to today, “Yeah, YOU hate Russia. MY teammate on my CS:GO team is Russian, so is he allowed to come practice with us or are you just gonna be an asshole?”
The rest really congealed around that point. What motivates this violence in Central and South America? Capital, of course. Sometimes simply cheap fruits. It’s an unstable region? Well that sure would make sense because of all the destabilization efforts. The war-seeking capitalist machine? Oh, you mean the MIC? It’s reproducing itself by making the shittiest conditions knows to man so people can get stuffed with propaganda. Why do I keep seeing foreign looking people crying in piles of rubble? Oh, North Korea is the most bombed place ever? No wonder they have a weird looking culture and struggle.
That’s the sort of thing that opened me up to learning more about the history of labor. Or when TC69 had us read
and give a book report. In the end I think imperialist violence for the sake of capital deserves to be frustrated and I’m slow to turn my nose up at the tactics employed for that strategy. I think there’s one political philosophy that has ever opposed it and it’s MLB (Marxist-Leninist-Bidenism, yes we exist, no I don’t read theory - lets score some home runs!!). By time I ever got a good look at just how sick and sad the American economy and work culture is and how unproductive the government spending is I was so entrenched, it was like "well duh! motions arms around "
The Ah HA! moment for me was reading the definition of “Dialectical Materialism” instead of brushing past it with contextual understanding.
My parents lived life by the rules. No drugs no booze hard working, went to church. Bought a house, lost their jobs got fucked. By the age of 13 I knew the way society was built was deeply broken. Anti-communist brain worms went deep and I was really politically illiterate for a long time. I knew nazis were bad, I thought communists and anarchists were naive/blind to the evils of human nature and obviously Liberalism was broken. I had some suc-dem ideas but I knew that people had been pushing those ideas since the 60s with no success. (First time I really listened to the lyrics of We Won’t Get Fooled Again really disillusioned me)
Something clicked during covid and really came together at the start of the Ukraine conflict. The narrative control was the same things they used with Iraq and I realized the people telling these lies were the ones who told me “communism just doesn’t work on a large scale.” The only people looking at the conflict clearly were Communists and they saw things clearly because they were analysing the historical record to come to a materialist conclusion of why the war was happening while everyone else spouted bullshit about “putin ebil” “russia bad”
I was always leftist since I was a kid, obviously the younger, the more social-democrat (I’m Spanish, for reference). I always felt more leftist than most people around me for some reason, it just made sense to me to have protection for workers, and the left seemed the humane side as opposed to the ruthless “free marke”.
The students union in Spain (sindicato de estudiantes, based) came to my school in post-2008-crisis and activism kinda started to be a thing for a bit, as in glueing signs on the streets on strike days, but i kinda lost contact with the union as i wasnt ready on a theoretical level. Around 18 years of age, I came across the US’s Economic Policy Institute’s study on wage-producivity gap: solid empirical evidence that workers are indeed being robbed of increasing amounts of their labor, which very much solidified my leftism.
In university, I became friends with a few communist buddies, and started to get slowly into theory, into more leftist spaces on the internet, etc. By the time I finished my bachelor’s, I was already a communist, but I was still missing some theory. Since I finished my masters’, I’ve been reading actual theory, and now that finally I’m more armed with theory I’ve recently gotten involved locally with a Marxist organization, I’m finally ready :
So I’d say it was a progressive journey, I don’t remember any particular moment when I went like "that’s it I’m going full commie*
The drug task force raided our home when I was 9 for growing weed. My parents are actually cited in a SCOTUS decision because of what went down. It wasn’t at that moment that I hated the US, but over the years it certainly manifested into what I believe today.
Nothing major, looking back I think its been the inevitable trajectory of my political thought. My first election cycle was being betrayed by the progressive promise of Obama, and every year since I’ve slid more and more to the left because I can see the system not working and my brain simply isn’t wired to go in the other direction and blame [insert scapegoat here] and become chuddy. From there it was just a matter of time before I read some actual theory and it all made perfect sense.
Even though I was a kid at the time, Obama got my hopes up way too much just to let me down. I’m sure many leftists in the US have a similar story.